Internet Audio Ads 

Ever want to make your own audio ad or greeting for your website? Its not very hard to do. Playing audio spots on your website can serve many different purposes. You can greet your users, tell them about the current specials, give them instruction, inspirational messages or even a joke or a song. Placing audio files on your pages only requires making and uploading your sound file and placing some code on your page.

In order to create your own audio ad or greeting, all you need is a computer with a sound card that has an input for a microphone, some audio software, and some source code. My favorite is software CoolEdit Pro, not so recently bought up by Adobe. (I hate it when they do this. Adobe has a tendency to buy good software that threatens their interest. They did this with Paint Shop Pro, Macromedia Flash and CoolEdit Pro, three of my favorite programs, but I digress). If you want to stay out of the premium priced software you might want to check out Audacity. Audacity is free and has similar features to other quality sound manipulation software.

Audio software can rather complicated but you need not worry about the functions you don''t understand. Take the time to learn them and you can make some weird, wild, and certainly unique sound files that sound very neat, but for now, just make a simple recording like you would on your telephone answering machine and save it as an mp3 or a wav file. Different formats will usually call up different programs to run them. If you want to embed your sound file so no extra windows or programs pop up, you will most likely want to stick with a wav file.

Once you have created a the sound file, upload it to your server. You can use the following code to embed an audio file on a web page:

Tip: If you embed your sound file, make your ad or greeting short so it will load and begin playing before your visitor goes to another page.